I feel like a proud parent all over again.

Because of discussions at certain social web sites and this blog, along with the westXdesign blog, I have seen the following over the past few weeks:

A writer friend set up his own wordpress installation to host his blog and has been tricking it out almost continually since. It’s looking great!
Somerset Bob’s Place

A great Christian artist put up his site and album tracks on Virb.
Scott Wilder

ANOTHER great artist set HIS Virb up.
Sonic Real Estate

And a few other folks got on the LibraryThing, Meebo, Goodreads, BlinkList, Stumbleupon, and ClipMarks bandwagons.

I’ve had all kinds of new friend adds on all of these services, and in the process have met some really awesome people, discovered great new music, and even added a new podcast to my line up: Chaotic Christians.

I’m feeling the web 2.0 social love, and it’s great to have been able to play some small part in the evolution of each!

If you work in the web industry, go take the survey. This will be a valuable tool to evaluate and review trends and particpation.

This 404 page is just too funny not to share it with you:

	This page cannot be displayed because you need some fresh air.
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. Your ISP has told us that you’re on-line several hours everyday, and that just ain’t right.
Please, for the love of god, try the following: Don’t click the Refresh button. Go outside now. If you are about to spend another $100 at Amazon, then please contact Amazon Anonymous. To go outside, first click the Cyber Hypnosis menu, and then click Cold Water in the Face. On the Numb Ass tab, click Sedentary Back Pain. The Get Out of Your Chair settings should match those provided by your local area network (LAN) administrator. If your Evil Computer Addict persona has enabled it, we can examine your network and quickly discover a way to wake you up from your computer-induced stupor. If you would like Windows to try and discover them, click Detect Computer-Induced Stupor There are a host of things awaiting you in the outside world: fishing, skiing, skeet shooting, triathlons, PTA meetings, and dentist appointments, for example. If you are unable to get up, click here and your power strip will emit a large enough shock to scare you back to your senses. If that doesn’t work, then we give up. You are officially in need of some serious help. Dial 1-800-GET-HELP on your computer’s keypad to reach a mental hospital near you. Click the Back button to melt your computer. Cannot find reality files Internet Exploder

See the original

Over the past 3 weeks, I have bought 3 brand new PCs from Dell. A 17″ laptop for my husband, a 15″ laptop for me, and a Dimension desktop for my mother in law. And Windows Vista came on all 3. I don’t like it, the systems are slower than my other computers, and I really just wanted XP. It did what I needed it to do. I have no interest in flashy pretty interfaces. I just want to get my work done! And now, this….

Friday, April 20, 2007

Dell Reinstates Windows XP As New PC Option

Dell, beaten to a pulp by the stick of public demand, is reinstating Windows XP as an option on new PCs, reversing a January decision to shift entirely to Vista.

You can now grab Home or Professional XP from the bullet points on their configurator, which has for the last three months been a giant ad for their competitors, as far as PC owners unwilling to deal with Vista’s quirks are concerned.

Why would Dell take action that Microsoft would rather it not take? The magic line, “Dell is currently the second-largest PC seller in the world” is why: the top spot was recently nabbed by HP, which, as of today, still foists compulsory Vista on us, at least when buying from their online store.

Remember that Microsoft plans to retire XP in only eight months. The brass balls required to kill off your most popular product to force people to buy its sequel speaks to a breathtaking degree of market control, and that they don’t have any fear whatsoever of OSX or Linux. As a crude but, I hope, effective analogy, could you imagine Sony taking the PS2 off the shelves to “force” people to buy PlayStation3?

The BBC has a great quote in its story, wherein a Gartner analyst wonders why people would prefer XP over Vista. Talk about the ivory tower…

Users force Dell to resurrect XP [BBC]

from the Gadget Lap at Wired

FIGURES.

Over on the westXdesign site, I posted an introduction to the social uses of the internet. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining what this ‘newness’ of community on the web is all about. I forget that very few people started where I did, and all of this is new and novel and amazing to them. Networks of friends, interacting through comments, chat, sharing files, pictures, videos, information. But that’s what the internet has ALWAYS been about. The only difference is the way in which it is happening. Today, it’s easier, and more interconnected. People don’t have to know anything about computers or programming to take part, and that wasn’t the case when I started.

Well, when DID you start, you ask….
without dating myself *too* much…
My first online community was a dial-up bulletin board which I interacted with using an Atari 800 and an 835 modem. That’s right. I wasn’t part of the Commodore crowd. And never joined the Apple bandwagon. It was Atari for me, and continued to be Atari all the way through until I bought my first Windows based PC in 199-something. I don’t want to say what year I got that first PC because I continued using my Atari ST longer than I care to admit. By this time, I was dialing into a local network, and accessing the web using a text-based browser. That’s back when the web was small.

My first experience with true real-time internet-based networking and socialization was the MUD (Multi User Dimension/Domain/Dungeon whatever). Specifically: TCZ (The Chatting Zone). Which still operates today. It’s through TCZ that I got hooked on the social aspects of the internet. I had friends from all over the world there, and no matter what time of day I logged in, there they were. I still have fond memories of many conversations and shenanigans involving Predator. I was Pegasus in case any of you reading care to know….

I built on my BASIC programming skills, and just naturally migrated to CGI and HTML. It was all fun and games, I loved the challenge and the friendships. By 1996, I was fully immersed in the online world, and have grown and changed as much as it has. So the social circles we have today with MySpace, Virb, Jaiku, Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds…it’s all natural. This is where we’ve been heading all along. It’s where I’VE been heading all along…

This evening while watering my front yard, I saw what I first thought was a young hummingbird. But unlike most hummingbirds, it stayed at the flowers as I approached, and even flew around my head. When I got closer, I found it to be a Hyles lineata, or “Hummingbird Moth”. Here are some pictures and video I captured before it got too dark to see.

Video Description: Cool footage of a White-lined Sphinx Moth (Hyles lineata) in my front yard the evening of 2007-04-11. It’s often referred to as a hummingbird moth because it can easily be mistaken for a young hummingbird because it resembles hummingbirds in size and behavior.

No longer taboo or a mark of deviancy (or motorcycle ownership), tattoos have become a regular part of our modern culture.

Most of us get our tattoos to either memorialize events or people, or to identity a part of ourselves that are usaully within us in a way for everyone around to see. Tell your tattoo story… Here are mine:

I got my first tattoo in May of 2004. I felt like I had lived an entire lifetime, and was beginning a whole second life. A failed marriage, raising 2 kids alone, working 3 jobs to make ends meet while trying to get my education. Fighting for security, both financial and emotional, for myself and my children. Then in 2003, things began to turn around. I had been promoted at my primary job and no longer needed to work more than 1 job, I was getting closer to earning my degree, and coming to terms with the scars left on my family. Then I met Brian, and from that day on, things got better and better. 2 days before receiving my degree, I went with Brian to his regular tattoo artist, and decided it was time. I chose a design that for me meant strength, hanging on, and beauty. Not knowing what to expect, I also made sure it was simple. While some people find the experience of getting a tattoo painful, I wouldn’t call it pain - just an uncomfortable feeling at times, and not much at the rest. This one is on my right calf.

The symbol of the dragon evolved between myself and Brian as sort of “our” theme. Honest, brave, tenacious, strong, protective. That was our relationship. He was my dragon, and I was his. We brought out the best in each other, and filled in the weaknesses we had. When we married, we used entwined dragons as our theme.

I finally got my second tattoo just this year (March). I took the image that been drawn for our wedding invitations, and added tribal markings and color to create an original tattoo. It is another symbol for my relationship with Brian, and after celebrating our second anniversary, it was my way of saying I meant ‘forever’. This one is on my left upper arm.

Use the comments to tell the story of your tattoos, or what you would get if you don’t have one. If you have pictures, email them to me and I’ll add them to this post so we can see what you’re talking about!